FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention concerns a device for managing a plurality of independent queues in a common non-dedicated memory space with no a priori static allocation of part of the memory space to each queue. It is more particularly concerned with a device of this type enabling dynamic allocation of memory locations as and when required so that the memory resource is optimized. It proposes a simple and effective device which does not utilize any mechanism based on lists of string pointers as are used in conventional solutions. It is principally addressed to applications in which queues are not necessarily unstacked in the same order that they were stacked, it being understood that the stacking and unstacking orders could be made identical subject to appropriate utilization constraints. A device of this kind must comprise means for determining at any time the locations in the memory space that are free and those which are being used by the queues and the queues to which memory locations already in use are assigned. The device must further comprise for each queue means of identifying the memory content of the longest reserved memory location and means for freeing this memory location and including it in the list of available memory locations when its content has been acted on (unstacked).